Tocqueville Didn’t Get to First Base in New York: Lewis Lapham

By Lewis Lapham -
Mar 27, 2010

In the spring of 1831 the young
French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville came to New York City on
the first leg of his journey across America to examine prison
conditions.

He was invited to endless dinner parties and balls by
ambassadors, judges, politicians and the richest bankers, but
despite the social whirl, Tocqueville found himself stranded in
a sexual desert. Young women flirted shamelessly but then
laughed and flitted away, while married women seemed
puritanically chaste.

“Would you believe,” he wrote to his brother, Edouard,
“Since our arrival in America we have been practicing the most
austere virtue? Not the slightest lapse. Monks could do no
more.”

Stunned by the sharp contrast to France, where marriage was
still a dynastic affair and sex more freely available,
Tocqueville pondered how wedlock might play out differently in a
commercially-obsessed and more egalitarian society. It became
one theme of his prescient and still-influential book,
“Democracy in America.”

I spoke with Leo Damrosch, author of “Tocqueville’s
Discovery of America” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), on the
following topics:

1. Energy & Entrepreneurship

2. Shocking South

3. Provisional Frontier Culture

4. Women and Family Focus

5. Manipulation of the Masses

To buy this book in North America, click here.

(Lewis Lapham is the founder of Lapham’s Quarterly and the
former editor of Harper’s Magazine. He hosts “The World in
Time” interview series for Bloomberg News.)

To contact the writer on the story:
Lewis Lapham in New York at
lhl@laphamsquarterly.org.